"We simply didn't have enough women who knew about our menstrual product [ThermaCare], and had to find a new way to connect with them," says Tom O'Brien, associate marketing director for personal health care at P&G, Cincinnati. R&D reveals women lamenting "there was one group of consumers they would like to see understand more deeply what it meant to have menstrual pain -- men."

Well, they nailed it with "cyclical nonuterine dysmenorrhea." Big Pharma's been successful at inventing chronic ailments for so long it's only natural they'd hit a home run doing it as a spoof. Catch one of the ThermaCare ads with poster boy Dr. Fardel here. - Contributed by Angela Natividad

- Lost Planet thinks they've made a trailer for their Xbox 360 game that'll shatter cultural norms, change lives and trigger brain aneurisms on-sight. It's a fair trailer but it won't look that great six months from now when some other game has kicked its ass, as these things tend to go.

- Fledgling supermarket Bloom cozy up with agency BooneOakley to make a real-live gingerbread house in South Carolina (of all fucking places)! And yes, we will help them eat it.

- News from our incognito buddy FishNChimps: Coke steals from actual creative people. That always leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. And considering they've been riding the holiday polar bear thing and/or copying Pepsi's campaigns for the last two hundred years to the nth degree, that really came as no major shocker. To witness the fuckage of other creative companies, hit Urban Counterfeiters.

- Join NPR's first-ever holiday craft contest before it is gone. Forever. Perhaps you can beat the cleverly rendered Mel Gibson menorah. Yeah, you heard us. A Mel Gibson menorah. Craftwise, it could be unbeatable.

- SAB Miller's Columbia by Bavaria beer is raffling off the famed "Man Smoking" painting on February 28 as part of a promotion.

- AdJab is as pissed off as we are about people labeling things viral before they actually become viral.

- George Parker is all over Julie Roehm's ass crapping on her supposed avalanche or job offers, delivering the inside story on Draft/FCB's lack of promised analytics skills and poking holes in the Advertising Age Jonah Bloom "in-depth" Julie Roehm interview. - Contributed by Angela Natividad

Catch Up Lady takes paranoid note of Starbucks' infiltration of Boston cab drivers, who seem to be in cahoots with It's Red Again, the pay-it-forward campaign that's got people doing all kinds of weird shit like buying baked goods for each other. And smiling! What's with the smiling?!

Catch Up Lady vows to bar herself indoors but to be honest we'd like to get in the way of the people giving out movie tickets and orgasmic pastries. Clearly another demonstration of how Starbucks intends to take over the world, to no positive end. - Contributed by Angela Natividad

The Department of Defense takes a shot at drinking with That Guy, another one of those characteristically we-speak-your-language government campaigns that, in a wildly uncool manner, attempts to demonstrate how uncool it is to be a drinker.

The site feels a bit dated and we agree with Bill at Make the Logo Bigger: there's not much of an attempt to reach out to swig-happy women, and you know we've seen a few. It's also a little stupid to put a "Fun Stuff" section on a site that hopes to lay it on thick about the mals of the bottle. - Contributed by Angela Natividad

Rexley and Roy of Dog Judo are back in a holiday promo as pointless and confusing as ever. Watch them duke it out over philosophy and headlocks while wearing gis, swigging beer and eating chicken. And don't forget to pick up some Christmas cards, which are just so awkward you can relish in the feeling of alienation that emanates from family and friends. - Contributed by Angela Natividad

Toyota pairs up with Swedish agency SWE to create On Toyota's Mind, a site that's supposed to creatively communicate to Swedes what Toyota's philosophy and values are without directly selling vehicles.

The site's certainly unique and has interesting music involving what occasionally sounds like a goat, but despite assertions that "we're not trying to sell any car directly on the site!" (PR guy, verbatim) every graphic leads to a cleverly-rendered media-kit style pitch about different facets of Toyota and new vehicle features. And unless what they're referring to is the tone in which this Flash-ridden kit was written, we're not finding much philosophy either.

We much preferred the Aygo campaign. At least then they were more direct about their intention: actually getting a car inside your living room. - Contributed by Angela Natividad

OK, so like ya know brands love to do ads with celebs because, like, it's really hard to pass up the opportunity to hang with someone like Scarlett Johansson, ya know? Besides, it's much easier to just whip together a celebrity photo shoot than it is to, say, come up with an actual advertising strategy. Look at BBDO's Pepsi work. All celebrities all the time. Still the number two soda. Oh fuck it, Scarlett's nice to look at so we're shuttin' our mouth now. More Scarlett here.

It seems silicone breast implants and Scientology are two topics Entertainment Weekly would rather leave alone lest it spark fury among the Hollywood elite that makes its existence possible or raise the ire of Tom Cruise's lawyer Betram Fields. The magazine rejected a TDA Advertising & Design-created campaign for outerwear company Cloudveil Mountain Works' new Hollywood skiwear line. The campaign was intended to reach Hollywood elite during the Sundance Film Festival and other events held at Aspen and Vail ski resorts.

One ad pictures a mock Aspen street sign, stating "Silicone implants begin to freeze at -10˚ Fahrenheit." Additional text, underneath inset photos of three Cloudveil jackets, read: "We'd like to remind you Hollywood types to dress accordingly." A second ad showed a Cloudveil jacket over copy reading: "We wanted celebrities visiting ski towns to know about us. It was either run an ad in this magazine, or become scientologists." See them both here and here.

We like the way this Grey-created campaign for travel agency Cruise Ship Centers integrates with everyday life and plays into the daydreams we all have about that perfect vacation we'd rather be on than the boring meeting we're sitting in or the monotonous work we're in the middle of. Each image in the campaign from the cruise ship-like iron to the leaning tower of Pisa-looking stack of cocktail glasses to the Alaskan iceberg-looking ice cream cone to the Caribbean island-looking coffee spill masterfully enables the dream. The ads are simple with minimal copy and they do their job beautifully. See all four ads here.

Ads involving carriages in a desperate race against crocodiles, tigers, spherical killer rocks and Satan always make for promising fare, which is why Oregon Trail was so popular, and which is also why this Nissan ad by Curt Detweiler via TBWA\Chiat\Day is so awesome.

Curt's new to LA having just come from TBWA Paris and this work suggests he merits some watching - for slapstick entertainment value if nothing else. And by the way, that image at left has little to do with the video but lots to do with QuickTime being douchey. It is, however, part of the TBWA Nissan campaign. Try not to get confused. - Contributed by Angela Natividad